Max line speed of HS2 is 360km/h, with provision for 400 in some sections in future. This is entirely in line with many other modern HS lines. China’s been running regular 360km/h services for years.
This is a project with a 200+ year shelf life. Designing to 300 or less would have been short sighted, and many of the changes to accommodate such high speeds actually reduce costs in the long term (slab track, headroom to catch up delayed services, ability for one trainset to operate more services per day etc).
The cost overruns of HS2 are primarily from plain old poor project management, complex planning law and constant political meddling, not engineering decisions.
China has run at 360kmh before, but last I checked they mostly run slower.
Air resistance is a killer as you go faster. So for trains 300 is usually about the best compromise between energy use and speed. If you want to go faster a jet at altitude is going to be much faster at a better fuel efficiency. High speeds make sense for long distances.
This is a project designed to last for centuries. We’re not even fossil free yet and already seeing days of negative electricity cost thanks to renewables. In 50 years the extra energy cost is going to be a rounding error. Locking ourselves into 300km/h forever to save a relatively small sum is unfathomably short sighted.
> Max line speed of HS2 is 360km/h, with provision for 400 in some sections in future.
That's already been reduced to 320 km/h under this year's "HS2 reset". Which I imagine in reality will be 300 km/h normally at most, with even lower speeds seen day to day
Interestingly the written report to the government stated "However, no railway in the UK, or globally, is currently engineered for 360 kph". Are you incorrect or did they forget to include China in their research?
Anyway, I thought these were last decade's talking points? I thought it was all about capacity now, not speed? Except I thought there were also rumblings about reducing capacity from the previous announcements? Hard to keep up...!
The messaging, in general, has been abysmal. But capacity and speed are not separate concerns. Consistently high average speeds increase capacity - I wish this had been actually communicated.
One of the drivers of cost has been the high speed part. It meant the route needed to be straight which meant more tunnelling to avoid certain areas. Lower speed track would have allowed them to route around problem areas.
High speed rail does not need to be straight! You can get away with 6km radii at 360km/h on dedicated passenger lines. The high power output of the EMUs they’ve selected and all new OHLE power supplies mean that trains can accelerate and decelerate much more aggressively than on legacy mixed use lines like the WCML, allowing smaller radii in practice with short slower sections. It’s a myth that HS2 is expensive because it had to be straight.
The vast majority of the tunnelling for HS2 has been either to get in and out of dense urban areas without too much demolition, or to reduce the political cost of driving a building site through Tory heartlands (Chilterns AONB).
The UK spends around £200bn a year on public healthcare that covers everyone, for a population around 1/5th the size. Scale that up and convert to USD and you’re still well under half the $3tn figure you quoted.
Universal healthcare is the norm in all of west / central europe, it's good quality, accessible for EVERYBODY (including the poors), and doctors still have great quality of life and are rich.
You guys are just getting f** by a mafia in the US and defending it for no factual reasons. Both by the military industrial complex AND the medical field btw.
I feel like I could’ve written exactly this myself.
The first point is the hardest. It affects every aspect of my life and I have no idea how to really tackle it. This is the first year where I feel the need to take drastic action to achieve some kind of improvement.
I would not even know how to call my so-called "technique" if somebody else did not do it for me: awareness.
What I do I would today call "reconciliation" or "making peace". Let me explain.
On the one hand, I start recognizing in a colder, more methodical and mathematical manner, what things I did screw up in my life and why. I drill down and understand what emotions, unmet needs and un-addressed trauma led to these faulty decisions. Then I say: I understand why I did it but this only worked against me, it's time to change it and put myself on a better path. And by "better path for me" I don't mean only financial and career success; I mean those _and_ being happier and calmer.
On the other hand, I allow my more beastly / primitive / emotional / immature side to show up. I don't shun it, I try to sympathize with it and somewhat validate it. That's basically treating a part of yourself like an angry and lost kid: you do feel for them but want them to stop doing damage. But you also want to not force anything on them; you want them to understand and internalize they are only hurting themselves and others (in this case: other parts of you) with zero benefit for anyone involved.
---
It's not easy. I had a very rocky start in life. Sure I did not sleep under bridges but growing up in a shitty Eastern European town with a gay brother and you yourself being the nerd who effortlessly gets all A grades and is also good at karate, physically attractive and liked by girls sadly had a ton of downsides that many people are blind of. Almost everyone hates you for being different and they feel threatened by you while all you want is to fit in and be a part of a friendly group. It was and still is a big tragedy, one I don't claim I have managed to come to terms with even as of today.
---
But what I do lately is talk to my more primal side: "Look, I really understand how much you hate doing X and Y. I hate them too! But what else would you do? We did it your way for so long, you had an almost complete full reign and look what happened -- now we all suffer from severely diminished physical and mental health, we hate our life and often our work, we know that we wasted our best years on pointlessly rebelling against things we could never change. Where did all that bring us? Please, work with me. I understand that you never feel heard because we never achieved the life you wanted. But I can't see any shortcuts. Do you? If not, then let us please take the long but much safer road to our goals. That way we'll still get there one day. If we are not making progress then we'll talk again and readjust strategy and maybe do things more your way. But in the meantime, can we do things my way for a while? Please?"
Or something very similar.
But all that is 99% specific to me. You really have to find your own way to your deeper and more primal / emotional side. It exists and very often sabotages you because you never give it the wheel. Being civilized does this to us and no, I am not saying you should go outside and beat someone to death with a ratchet wrench of course. I mean that you should find a way to do the things you truly want, regardless of the cost.
I am NOT doing this well at the moment. For example I am too chicken to give up programming. But as mentioned above, I am trying to reconcile a few factors the best way I can for the moment. Maybe if that unlocks more energy and more motivation then the time would be ripe for more drastic measures.
Adult diagnosis last year for me, bring gentle with myself for past mistakes is part of my plan. I’m also trying adderall under medical supervision, so I can strengthen the habits and systems with a little extra help.
Check my reply to your sibling. No good formula. I am just starting (was somewhere at the beginning of 2025). In general: try to reconcile the parts of you that don't feel listened to, with your everyday self.
And be a touch assertive when you need to. I found I can't just put down the phone so I changed what I do on my phone (books instead of doom-scrolling). So far it works okay-ish. I am fine with a gradual progress.
The Ayn Rand quote ("Man cannot survive except through his mind. He comes on earth unarmed. His brain is his only weapon") neatly distills precisely what worries me the most about an AI dominated future: that those in control of our destiny seem to have swallowed her misanthropic philosophy that (to paraphrase Rand again) "he is not a social animal".
Man, in fact, cannot survive without society. You don't have to be a communist to realise this. Until now the stratification of society has had certain unavoidable limits - everyone has a finite lifespan, everyone has an upper bound of intelligence and physical ability - as well as self imposed limits of regulation through states or unions. When kings and empires have come to dominate, revolutions have at least attempted to reform the social order, if not reset it. I fear that with AGI in the hands of the likes of Musk and Thiel we may soon be entering an age when men with Rand's worldview have the kind of power that makes them utterly untouchable and any chance of building a just and democratic future becomes impossible.
Sometimes I feel a deep sense of loss of the old web that grew up with -full of niche interests, unashamedly earnest and rich in subcultures- has been lost in a sea of corporate slop and clickbait social media.
Then occasionally I come across something like this and it feels like all is not lost. Conway's GoL was one of the first C programmes I ever wrote and I've long been distantly fascinated by cellular automata but I had no idea that there was such a depth of research (work, experimentation, collaboration? how do you even describe this kind of collective endeavour?) into GoL lurking out there all these years.
Graham Dennis (author of the article) absolutely does not ignore this. He regularly points out that Irish rail ridership exploded almost in lockstep with GB rail network growth despite remaining entirely publicly run. Even right at the top of this article he points out that the growth had begun long before privatisation. He goes into a lot more detail in his book.
Possible complicating factor is that at about the same time Irish Rail started experimenting with radical new concepts like having trains that were not from the early 1960s, and having more than one commuter line in the entire country. So possibly hard to read too much into it; there’s an argument that Irish journeys just went up because the system was becoming rapidly less terrible.
(I remember being amazed as a kid in the 90s on encountering a mainline train that had automatic doors. Irish Rail was pretty behind the times for a long time.)
The growth didn't happen long before privatization in the UK though. It turned around almost exactly when the privatization process started (which wasn't an immediate overnight event).
I'd argue that the upswing had started in the 1980s and took a hit along with the economy between black monday (87) and ERM2 crash/black wednesday (92)
The privatization took years however, it wasn't an overnight thing. A lot of the process was just writing down and professionalising a lot of aspects that were previously ad-hoc, so the benefits started before the precise date drawn on the graph. The law was passed in 1993 but preparations began before that, it was clear this was going to happen even in 1991.
This is a project with a 200+ year shelf life. Designing to 300 or less would have been short sighted, and many of the changes to accommodate such high speeds actually reduce costs in the long term (slab track, headroom to catch up delayed services, ability for one trainset to operate more services per day etc).
The cost overruns of HS2 are primarily from plain old poor project management, complex planning law and constant political meddling, not engineering decisions.